Carl Colbert, 46, had just returned to his North Luzerne Avenue home and started taking in the groceries around lunchtime Thursday when he heard the shots ring out.

Colbert ducked. Laid low. And waited. When he looked outside, three people — two women, 20 and 28, and one man, 21 — were bleeding on the street in front of his home.

“It’s scary,” said Colbert, who works in home improvement. “We’ve lived here one year, and we’ve already seen three or four shootings.”

Colbert’s new Dodge Durango was also hit several times in the barrage of bullets.

This story continues below
Advertisement

“I just got this car,” he said as he watched his vehicle leak fluid. “This is no way to live.”

The violence has gotten so bad that Colbert, his wife, Angela Ruffin, and their two children, ages 7 and 19, want out of the neighborhood.

“We can’t go outside,” said Ruffin, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. “We can’t even sit in the living room. My children are afraid to meet people in the neighborhood. Saudi Arabia was safer than this. I come back from the military and I’m in the middle of a war zone. There’s a damn drug war and a gun war going on right in front of my house.”

Ruffin says her daughter has written letters to Gov. Martin O’Malley and Mayor Sheila Dixon asking for help.

“A lot of people think that everyone who lives in this neighborhood is a drug dealer and we deserve the violence — but that’s not true,” Ruffin said. “There’s a lot of honest, hardworking people here. We don’t deserve this.”

Police did not release the names of the people shot, but said their injuries were not life-threatening.

Police said there have been 217 shootings in Baltimore this year, compared with 165 through the same time last year.

lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com